The importance of kindness

Sam de Brito

The commencement speech game is a brutal business in the US with cashed-up universities, boasting galaxies of star former students, competing for the biggest names to give pithy talks to their graduating classes.

Barack Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Bono, Arianna Huffington, Stephen Colbert, Bill Gates, they've all done them too, with the news website Salon noting recently "some figures have become regulars on the commencement circuit, delivering variations of the same speech year after year. Since becoming president in 1993, Bill Clinton has spoken at more than 35 graduation ceremonies".

Locally, musician Tim Minchin delivered the 'occasional address' at his alma mater, The University of Western Australia, last year and almost two million viewers have clicked in to hear his touching nine points of advice on life.

This is the stock-in-trade of the commencement speech - advice as to how to get on in the world and, hopefully, succeed so much you can come back and give the commencement speech in 30 years time.

Sometimes, as with David Foster Wallace's now famous 2005 'This is water' address at Kenyon College, a speech will also deliver wisdom you'll pretty much find nowhere else. (I got so excited about that one back in 2008, it became my only tattoo.)

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One speech, I'd not heard of until recently is writer George Saunders' address to the 2013 class of Syracuse University, which has drawn wide admiration for it's very simple invocation for us to be kinder to each other.

The speech - like Wallace's - has now been published as a book, an animated version has just been released and it'll no doubt be further reduced to a .gif for Facebook users to 'Like' in their millions, sucking all flavour and nuance from what is a tidy little reflection on modern life.

It reads in part:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “Ellen.” Ellen was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth.

At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”

"What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly."

George Saunders

Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it. And then - they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she was there, next day she wasn’t. End of story.

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her. But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.